Decades
by Stranger Than Friction
Summary: This is wanting something so badly, you're willing to make the mistake of letting yourself have it. Rosalie and Edward have been making the same mistake for decades.
1. Chapter 1

Disclaimer: Twilight? Wasn't me.

* * *

**1933**

"It didn't mean anything."

"Of course not."

Because that is the beginning and ending of everything. It took almost a year to get to the base of this tree, completely destroyed in a new and different way. The beginning took about a year—the ending, if that's what you want to call it, took about fifteen minutes.

"Where's my coat?" whispered acidly into the night sky, and on his breath some wish upon a star that he and I had stayed in our respective beds, counting sheep for a sleep that couldn't come. Compared to this celestial plea, the whereabouts of his clothing—what a ridiculous question. And he sounds vaguely upset, as if I've tricked him into something, as if depriving him of his coat is some unforgivable crime—and undoubtedly, _I'm _responsible.

"Well, I'd like to know where my dress is," I say, sitting up, brushing my mussed hair out of my face—wondering how, of all places, I ended up in these godforsaken woods, rolling around in the underbrush for—not even for my own entertainment or his, but for some _goddamn relief. _Relief from thinking of and wanting to; relief from reading my mind and not needing to read his. Relief from my dress.

"I think the issue of my dress is rather more important," I say to his disgruntled, disheveled moonlit face.

"Of course you do."

I hate him. He's buttoning his shirt, I'm pulling on my stockings; the moonlight is stalking both of us.

"Don't patronize me."

"I wouldn't dream of it."

"You _can't_ dream of it."

"Don't remind me."

This, I know, hits a raw nerve. Hits something. I don't pretend to know what he used to dream about, but I know it wasn't this. It wasn't this messy unraveling under white oaks and ash trees, pressed up against crumbling brick buildings in the middle of the night. This natural sin of ours is not enough Milton and too much Thomas Hardy even for pretending to sleep at night. We're awake for all hours, wildflowers pressed into our spines, keeping us up.

"I appreciate your critical assessment of the botanical aspect of our—"

Halt. Because he doesn't know what to call this, but he can't stop that dire need to be disdainful; his mouth too goes running off without his brain.

"Fling," I suggest, affixing a stocking to its garter. "Do go on; I wanted to see where you were going with this insult."

"Not worth the time," he mumbles.

"Oh, but I am worth the fifteen minutes."

xxx

Stumbling home in the dark, almost drunk but without the excuse. And we're only close in the language of tripping footfalls, broken branches, and whispered admonitions of _No one finds out_. On my part, on his.

Reasonably, he could just run home, but he needs the time to think, to let the elements punish him as adequately as they can for what he has just done. Or maybe he just needs to break something. Twigs count.

He finally found his coat, I finally found my dress, and we will both have to lie about the way in which they were destroyed. Maybe I'll invent Edward into a bobcat—are there bobcats in Rochester?—maybe he'll invent me into a lioness.

"Esme and Carlisle won't ask questions. I'll—I'll just say I fell or something," he mutters.

"What?" I laugh. "I broke your fall?"

Of _course_, that's how Edward thinks of it.

"It's not funny," he hisses, but the side of him that can't stand being ungentlemanly moves to lift me up and carry me over the muddy ditch before us. And weightless in his arms, for a moment I understand that detrimental silly town fascination with Edward Cullen. _Mind closed_, I remind myself. He sets me down; we continue on our way.

It was a pointless gesture, of course. He knows very well how my dress got muddy in the first place. _No, there's no fixing this now_.

A few steps later by a sprawling sugar maple, I turn around and look at him. There won't be any excuse for this new level of squalor; the back of my dress already feels sticky with sap. He's looking at my muddy dress again, and I'm waiting for him to start talking about Faulkner. Waiting for him to tell me that this dress is foreshadowing. Somehow, I will signal the decline of the house of Cullen.

"It was a little funny," I say. _Sound the fury_, I think.

"You're not as bad as Caddy Compson," he says—ignoring my words, hearing only my thoughts. My occasional urges to kick him in the face return, ever faithful. "Not yet."

_There they go again_.

"It's a shame you can't drown," I say. Almost fiercely, he puts a hand to the sugar maple, some sort of rebuttal to this offensive statement. _Breathe, breathe, breathe—even if you can't do that anymore. _The other hand. "But I think the poetry of it alone would kill you," I say mockingly, and he's going to get stuck this way, his hands glued on either side of me, leaning on the sugar maple.

"She reads," he says.

"_Quel surprise_."

And before I can bother pretending to stop him, he's ruining my dress again, covering me in sap, kissing it off. He's kissing me, and he's the only thing I've tasted since I died. Maybe that makes it sentimental that I didn't stop his hands from rediscovering the bodice of my dress, his lips from reclaiming my neck (this part, I am convinced, is all repression), and finally—when we are done denying each other—my mouth again. Even for all our primness, when he seizes my face, kissing me harder still, I don't shy away from his dirty hands.

Dawn breaks, so do we. "_Quel surprise_, indeed."

Remember That (First) Time? (Hindsight Mix)

"First Timer," Elliott Smith, _New Moon_ [This song is too soft for us—R.]

"One Line," PJ Harvey, _Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea_

"Gender Bombs," The Stills, _Logic Will Break Your Heart_

"Bones," The Killers, _Sam's Town _[This was your exact reaction, Edward.]

"Open Up Your Arms," Her Majesty, _Memory & Loss_

"Sex On Fire," Kings of Leon, _Only By the Night _[Don't flatter yourself, Rosalie.]

"Breaker," Low, _Drums & Guns_

**2003**

Sometimes, when sleep eludes me and the night is unending, I see it all over again. Clutching my headphones and retreating into my pillow, her anguished face all over again, on the floor. She attributes my coldness in that moment to some desire to break the broken. Truthfully, I was breaking myself. My bloodless veins were making the sound that ice makes in hot water, cracking. All I can say is that I was startled. She was a disaster to watch that day; I was a disaster in return. Eighteen years old, like a vandalized art museum (and here, if she could read minds, she would call me a tourist), like a Renoir cut out of its frame. Every restless night or so, I hear the security alarm going off.

She thinks it's morbid that I see her death like a movie scene, like some surrealist dream with a distorted soundtrack. I just think it's appropriate. Everything about the way she came into our lives is surreal. And she picked the song.

"I'm not going to let you use this perpetual insomnia excuse on me anymore," she says suddenly, as if I've dragged her kicking and screaming into my room, as if our little midnight bedside chats are a punishment I've inflicted on her. If she were any good at saying no to me, she would be in her own room, giving herself a manicure and listening to the Black Keys. And God, if I were any good at saying no to her, I would make her stop rearranging my CDs. "This game—it's juvenile and ridiculous," she says, "and your music taste is _puerile_, at best."

"Oh, did we learn a new word today, Rosalie?" I reply, turning over some Joy Division album she gave me twenty years ago. She flinches, and I still love that slightly enraged face she makes. She makes it a lot, actually.

This juvenile, ridiculous game… I don't even know how long ago it began. No, that's a lie. After the first… the _first, _I sat at the piano for days. And sneaking up behind me as well as she could with her loud wild young dangerous thoughts, she put her hands over mine on the piano. And, as alive as I'd been since death, I ignored her—vivid shameful memories of the woods playing like a broken record in my head. She put her lips to my ear, and I wanted to rip my most prized possessions to _bits_ for her.

"Fine," she whispered. "Don't kiss me. Don't even look at me." I was learning how to breathe and forgetting all over again. And slowly, that lilting voice that seeps into my skin: "Why don't you write me a _symphony_, Edward?"

She was taunting me. In her thoughts and her words, she accused me of being this unfeeling, repressed bastion of stoicism—_no_, she dared me, _I would never touch her. I'd compose lyric poetry about her instead_.

This soon became fundamentally untrue.

To summarize seventy years: I wrote her a symphony; she made me a mix tape. We'd been challenging each others' musical tastes ever since, in my bedroom at all hours of the night, creating playlists for every moment between us—even those moments that eluded our mutual grasp. Rosalie had made a playlist for my death; I had made a playlist for hers. Even when we hated each other, Rosalie thrived on critiquing my CD collection, and I was always gracious enough to grant her a piano lesson… if only to feel my hands on hers again. It was—

It was a game.

"You listen to Muse. Who still listens to Muse? 'Time is Running Out' is their only good song," she says, little fingers tinkering with the ancient record player that sits on my windowsill. "_Absolution_ isn't even a good album; you just like feeling that you're not 'metaphysically alone' and that whiny emo boys understand you."

Sometimes, when Rosalie's talking, I completely stop listening. I know she resents this, but tonight, she is grounded in the present, and I am lying under a tree in 1933, still concerned about the state of her dress.

"I like that dress… on you." She looks at me like she wants to kill me. It's unforgivable of me to ignore her when she's mocking me. "It's like… it reminds me of that painting—_Dance at Bougival_, with the white skirt and the—"

"You are such a tool."

Well, she never could take a compliment.

"Excuse me?"

She raises an eyebrow at me, completely without irony. "No, seriously. Who raised you? Would you like walk into a bar with that line—'Hey, gorgeous. You know, you have the most _beautiful_ eyes, very Pablo Picasso circa 1923.'"

"I would never compare a woman's eyes to a Picasso."

"Really? I think you compared me to a Kandinsky once…"

Messy, vibrant, beautiful—liable to give you a pounding headache but, in its own way, musical and orderly in its madness. If she hadn't been shredding my clothes when I'd made the comparison, I would have elaborated. She's Kandinsky in his Blue Rider period. She's like Composition VII. I do like the geometry of his Bauhaus period, I do… but so much order does make you long for chaos. Rosalie. When it comes to chaos, Rosalie delivers.

"But I like Kandinsky," I say.

"No, you don't—not really," she says, tapping my Muse CD on the windowsill with no regard for its value. "You like to look at it, but you wouldn't collect it."

Accusing.

"Who _collects_ Kandinsky?"

"Who listens to Muse?"

"Point well-taken. Now, come here."

This is always the stumbling point. Trying to bridge the gulf between us. When our minds finally stand on the same side of shore, our bodies are oceans apart. But then, when our bodies are together, our minds are gone completely. In any case, the thought of taking those first, desperate steps has always made Rosalie and I both seasick.

"No."

Expected.

"We'll choose a different song—we can do a different playlist." And God, I hate the pathetic way I bend just so we won't break.

"_No._"

She's toying with me now. Rosalie always says _no _just to make sure her mouth remembers the word, to make sure I remember she can. Can she still break me with a single syllable? _Yes. _Damned if I let her know that. 112 years of practiced politeness and restraint are all that keep me from pinning her to the windowpanes.

"Just come over here, Rose."

An almost-silence as she opens the window, exposing my bedroom to the autumn night. She perches, half outside, staring at me. _Convince me_.

"Okay, we could start with 'She's Lost Control.' We'll do the summer of '87, if you want." Stupid and desperate to even suggest playlisting the summer of '87.

"I'm saving 'She's Lost Control.' But we're definitely starting with Joy Division. None of that ridiculous cover shit."

"Yes."

"Fine," she says, and I shouldn't have begged her to come sit on the bed with me.

Because she's just waiting for me to lose control.

* * *

**A/N:** So I'm new to... everything. All comments and criticism are very welcome; I'm trying to get back into writing, and this seemed like a good way to go. Besides, I couldn't get the idea of Edward and Rosalie out of my head.


	2. Chapter 2

_Two_

**

* * *

1985**

Rosalie is taking the decade very personally. Every Madonna single and John Hughes movie that emerges, she absorbs into her personal zeitgeist. It is as if, despite the realization that we have an eternity—that months and years and decades ultimately mean nothing to us—she wants to mark the time as physically as she can, her body bearing witness to every small cultural change in the world that lies beyond our front door. As dead and soulless as we are, Rosalie strives to blend into whatever human version of herself would wander the outside world—baggy cut-up sweatshirts and skintight leggings and too much eye makeup. Emmett watches in happy amusement, sticking as always to the woodsy style in which he feels most at home; I watch in nothing short of fascination.

And now, still, I cannot get over the sight of her, under the hood of my sleek black 1956 Jaguar XK-140—a prized possession of mine, which I realize isn't exactly practical—just fucking beautiful. I suppose that says something about me.

It probably also says something about us—yes, that _us_ that is not _us _between the hours of five a.m. and midnight, on holidays or school nights—that I bought the car with Rosalie. Quickly. I bought the car with Rosalie _quickly_, because she said to me—and these words ring in my ears every time I look at the leather interior: "There is _nothing_ I wouldn't do to you in this car. _Nothing_."

So far, we haven't been stupid enough to test this theory out. But I'm dying to.

She knows it.

And this is why, when she sees me ducking under the door and stepping into the garage, Rosalie looks up at me as if this is all a game. "Your carburetor," she begins, wiping a smudge of grease from her cheek, "is shit. I can't work under conditions like this. Your fuel pump is worthless, which is why your float is freaking out, and the choke is fine or whatever, but the throttle cam keeps—"

I like to drive my car, and Rose likes to talk about it. I don't want to talk about the throttle cam, or how cold my engine is. I sort of just want to—

"But of course, you have no idea what's wrong with your car." She throws the formerly white rag she's been working with to the ground for effect. "You don't care. You prefer to sit in the window and gaze at your car, so it doesn't really matter if it moves or not."

"Rosalie, that is a Jag you're talking about," I say, running a hand over the clean curve of the silver rear view mirror. "Show some respect. The fuel pump is not worthless, and you just blatantly don't know how a throttle cam works."

Rosalie is about to throttle _me_.

"I'm sorry, Edward—do I see _you _under the hood of this car?"

"We could both be under the hood of this car, if you'd let me."

"Very funny, Edward," she quips, looking behind her out the garage windows. "Everyone's still home. Seriously, your engine is totally lifeless—probably because you don't drive the damn thing. God, take it for a spin every once in a while. I'd drive it for you, but you won't let me _in _it."

I'm sort of saving the car. It's only been in the Cullen family for six months, and aside from the odd spin around the block, I haven't really put the Jag to the test. I'm waiting for a special occasion to take it on a real joy ride.

"You can't drive my car."

"Obviously—I can't start your car." As she shuts the hood, her face suddenly shifts from angry exhaustion to a shade of lament. "God, what a shame. This car is _art._" She looks up at me. "And please stop calling it a 'Jag.' It reminds me of drug addicts and sharp objects. Can't you just say the name of this _gorgeous_ car the way it was meant to be said?"

I think I am about to throw myself into the grill when Rosalie actually _stretches out _on the hood of my car, her fingertips tracing the same lines I had been admiring. "_Jaguar_," she whispers, and abruptly I'm admiring different lines. "God, isn't that British? _Jag-u-ar._"

_Calm down, Edward. _"Right, as in: _Jag, you are_ my_ favorite_ car, so I would really appreciate it if Rose could fix you instead of molesting my paint job."

"Shut up. What would you do without me, Edward?"

Very valid question.

xxx

**1983**

I can't believe it's been fifty years, and we're still just having sex. I'm still wrapped up in Edward's sheets, and this still means less than nothing. Our intertwined feet are of superficial significance—this closeness is a barrier and not a bridge. Our bodies don't connect us—they come between us. Our hearts and minds stop where our bodies end. I can claim ownership of no part of the man that lies beside me, and even the brush of his toes against my ankles cannot forge a bond between us.

Lying here semi-conscious, Edward is probably composing a song inspired by the ceiling cracks, and I feel cracked from side to side, aching with the sense of loss that comes solely from never possessing something in the first place. I'm losing Edward with the realization that I have never had him.

I know I'm being an idiot. _Emmett_. Emmett who is very much in love with me. And I love him back, I know that, but—

Have you ever had that sort of all-consuming, raging wildfire of an attraction, the sort of thing that—if you were to fully indulge it, to give yourself to it completely—you would be in ashes by the morning? I couldn't be with Edward all the time. We'd torch each other. The love that Emmett and I have… it's like a slow-burning cigarette; and whatever Edward and I are doing, is more like a… hydrogen bomb. It won't last.

Especially not when Edward still says things like: "Get out of my bed, Rosalie."

The best part of waking up is Edward growling at you to stop kicking at his sheets. He's sitting up now, and his hair is a bird's nest of last night's debauchery. I've gotten used to his _Who are you?_ glances, his morning breath, the pillows he throws around in frustration during his Heavy Meditation (Goddamn It, I Miss Sleep) nightly ritual. I never, however, get used to this persistent reminder: Rosalie, you're taking up the side of mattress that belongs to someone Edward has yet to meet. And when she arrives, she will be none too pleased that Goldilocks is in her bed.

I retract my foot from his. "Why?" I ask, throwing the one pillow we have left at his face. "Do you need your privacy so you can write a sonnet, or something?"

"What?"

Edward turns his back to me, pulling on yesterday's Velvet Underground T-shirt. _Ugh, I gave him that fucking shirt. _I sometimes wish Edward would be less obvious, but I'll make him change before everyone else gets back from hunting. I'm staring at the muscles in his back, faintly visible through his T-shirt, and I'm abruptly reminded of the cause of this whole mess. Every time I look at Edward, I'm struck by this inconvenient desire to touch him.

"Well, what else do you do with your free time?" I ask, sitting on my hands.

He smirks at me over his shoulder. "_You_."

_Zing. _"Fair enough," I reply, scanning the room for my own clothes. It's one more case of Edward's perennial selfishness that my clothes are always _ruined_ by the time we get out of bed, and the most he has to deal with is a ripped belt loop or a few missing buttons. If I shop too much it's because we go through three outfits a week.

"You've never complained about that before," Edward says, standing and fully dressed and _invading my personal space as usual_.

"Shut up, Rosalie," he says, responding to my thoughts the way he usually does. He walks over to my side of the bed (—the left side, not mine), leans over me, and kisses me back into the mattress. And then, lips mere millimeters from mine: "Did I say 'Get out of my bed' yet?"

_Tease_.

"That's unfair."

_It wouldn't be if you'd stay out of my head._

"I suppose I won't dignify that with a response then," he smiles, ripping the covers off the bed. "Seriously. Leave. I have things to do."

Even though I can't feel the cold, there's something very disconcerting about sitting in my underwear on a coverless bed, a bed that I was practically thrown into last night. I hop off the mattress and promptly punch Edward in the stomach.

"Jesus, Rosalie!"

"Never forget, Edward," I say, grabbing last night's ripped jeans and shredded T-shirt from underneath his chair, "it's not like I don't have someplace else to be." And he flinches almost imperceptibly at the reminder. "But when you're not with me, you're alone. Think about that before you kick me out of bed in the morning."

xxx

**1985**

"Where are you going?"

Rosalie's pale fingers are just barely visible on the window's ledge. With a short sigh of exertion, the rest of Rosalie comes back into view as she swings her stocking-feet over the windowsill. "That's none of your business," she says, looking at me defiantly.

"Okay, let me rephrase. Where are you going looking _like that_?"

We could start with the fingerless lace gloves. Or, we could start with the _corset_ that leaves far too little to my incredibly active imagination_. _Or maybe the tulle skirt, back-seamed tights, and the spike heels she's holding in her left hand. Oh, and the cross. Can't forget the cross. The words "Like A Virgin" somehow don't immediately come to mind.

She tilts her head at me, biting her lip. "I'm going to go get in some trouble," she says finally. "Wanna come?"

_Yes_.

"No. Rosalie, what are you doing?" I ask, walking towards her hesitantly, because—at this point—I know the sort of ticking time bomb Rosalie can be. She's always waiting to destroy something, potentially the entire town of Hoquiam, Washington. She doesn't like rules or clearly-defined lines; she likes small explosives and crawling out of back windows. "Sneaking out on a school night?"

"Relax, _Dad_. I'll be back before four, and even if I'm not, I barely have any cuts this semester. And _Madonna_ is playing the Paramount Theatre. I have my priorities."

I personally find it a little embarrassing that she's valuing a pop singer over her education, but I guess school gets a little boring for all of us. Though Rosalie's "barely have any cuts this semester" line is total crap, because we both got cuts from French and Biology that one time in the library stacks…

So I suppose school's not that boring.

"Look, Rosalie—I'm not going to cover for you with Carlisle and Esme. Especially not for _Madonna_—the Cure concert was the last time. How are you even planning to get there?"

"It takes 2 hours if I drive, twenty minutes if I run, so the choice is obvious. And you're a bitch about the car anyway," Rosalie says, playing with her rosary. She looks out the window impatiently, as if the whole two minutes I've been talking to her has irreversibly changed her travel schedule. "Edward, don't get your panties in a twist," she smirks, drawing her legs back up to the window's ledge. "I already ate."

Quickly scanning her thoughts—mostly a jumble of catchy hooks and scenes from Marilyn Monroe movies—I stumble upon Rosalie's utter bewilderment that I'm still standing in her bedroom. "What are you waiting for?" she asks. "A kiss good night?"

"I just—I just don't understand why you're going to this stupid concert," I mutter. To be perfectly honest, I've been looking forward to a different sort of Wednesday night. The _usual_ sort of Wednesday night. And part of me is startled by the idea of a Rosalie beyond the confines of these house walls and the halls of our high school, a Rosalie that belongs to everyone else… out in those drunken crowds, and the eyes of strange men…

"Edward, don't you ever miss feeling human?" she asks, yanking me back to reality, holding me in her eyes for longer than I can feel comfortable with. "Feeling part of everything else?" Before I can answer, her feet are swinging back through the window, and she's disappearing into the April night.

xxx

I feel like Molly Ringwald. So _Sixteen Candles_, sneaking back into my own house, and feeling really truly eighteen for the first time in a while. Stockings snagging on a tree branch as I press open the window and I feel so young, but crawling back into that desolate bedroom and those scarecrow shadows on my wall… I feel just about as hopeless as Samantha Baker did, waking up that uneventful morning, not yet feeling any different. Staring at the ceiling, humming "Crazy for You"…. I'd say I feel about eighteen. Sixteen even.

_What I'm dying to say is that I'm crazy for you…_

I feel so high school notebooks, so margins filled with hearts and secret names, so passing notes and the persistent plucking of daisy petals—each one representing some romantic wish, some hope crushed, some "He loves me not." I feel a little pathetic. A little desperate. For all the sexual liberation I thought I was proclaiming four hours ago—fingerless gloves and spike heels sending out a clarion call of independence—dependency is still all I know here in my bedroom. Oh God.

_I've never wanted anyone like this… _

"Hey there, Madonna."

I suddenly feel my spine more sharply than I ever did when I was alive, and I'm bolt upright on the bed before Edward's finished speaking. Madonna is no longer the artist in question; John Hughes is no longer directing the constant film series in my mind. It's more… Joy Division and Alfred Hitchcock. Or maybe I'm kidding myself. Maybe it's Samantha Fox and Woody Allen.

And feeling his presence, I can already picture him in the doorway—messy, sexy, and rumpled, the way he is with me, the way he _can be_ with me. The expectation that he will lay siege to my defenses, that I will surrender—and I do. My armies are always weak and willing. But God, that horrid smirk in his voice. Hey there, Madonna.

"And here I thought I was the whore part of this little complex of yours," I reply.

Silences echo. This one did.

"This..." This is Edward cursing his reflexes, trying to reach into his box of defense mechanisms, but only feeling stammers and stutters at his fingertips. Finally, his grasp finds the classic line as he turns to go: "This conversation is beneath me."

"No, Edward," I say, eyes locked, resolutely dead ahead. "Usually I'm beneath you."

And he puts his hand to his head, as if he can think his way out of this room and out of these words. But then: "Jesus, Rosalie—I don't think you're a whore," and I think he really means this. I think he really wants to mean this.

"I'm not saying you think I'm a whore; I'm saying you treat me like a whore." My knees are tucked into my chest, and I would get up and put some music on, make some attempt to diffuse the loaded air around us, but movement seems too tall an order right now. And I think one ripple of air could knock Edward over.

He's terrified to touch me, I can tell. Would this be a confirmation or a rejection of all I have just said? And how should he kiss me, or should he kiss me at all, and if he kisses me, will we ever be the same again, will we be skipping French class for French kisses and torrid trysts in the library alcoves…

"Rosalie, I don't want it to be like this," he says. And he's touching my things, the keepsake necklaces scattered over my dresser, and sacred letters I never sent. And when he's running his hands over the navy blue cover of my favorite copy of _The Age of Innocence_, the only book I'll read twice, it feels like his hand is running over my own spine, and every word he says is whispered in my ear. "I don't want to keep hurting you like this."

And this is a lie. He loves hurting me like this. He loves feeling me breaking underneath him.

"Don't think things like that."

"I've been with you too many times not to think things like that," I reply, and I forget to tell him to stay out of my head. My mind is lying open tonight; it's not exactly breaking and entering. "Please don't touch my stuff."

"Fine," he says, somewhat angrily.

"Hey—" I turn to face him at long last, and he is clearly upset that I haven't waved my white flag yet, his back turned toward me. "Go ahead, Edward. Break me," I say.

"Fuck" is Edward's immediate reaction. He stops fiddling with the trinkets on my dresser and turns to face me, utterly livid at the connotations, the insinuations, my little inroads on his perfection. "Why are you making this so difficult?"

"I'm not. It's what you wanted."

"You're always fighting me."

I almost laugh. "That is such a lie, Edward. I never fight you," I say, thinking of all the mornings-after, all the twisted dawn sheets and obvious bedhead, and the worst thing about never sleeping: those mornings after start _right _after, and every guilty secret feels indomitable in the dark. "I never fight you. That's the problem."

"You fight me before, you fight me afterwards—"

"But I never fight you during, _that's _the problem, Edward."

Edward is silent for a moment. "No," he says thoughtfully. "It's everything else that's the problem."

"Why are you here? It's been a long night. I need to not be with you."

"It's been a long fucking _forever_, Rosalie," he says, trying not to shout. "Can't we just be civil to each other?"

"We're a lot more than civil to each other, Edward. And yes, it has been a long forever."

I hate this. Sometimes, when I'm talking to Edward, the ceiling feels like it's rushing to meet me, the windows and bookshelves are bending into me, and he's still trying to convince me to like Tom Waits. I've been trying to forget everything all night and lose everything in the lyrics of "Material Girl"or "Holiday," to leech some carefree modern happiness off of inebriated passers-by, and Edward has to walk into my room and ask for something I wish I weren't so ready to give. _Dear Rosalie, try saying no. It's fun, and it pisses Edward off_.

"Jesus. I can't," I say at last, lying down again, spent. "This is too much, and I'm suffocating, and I don't want to do this anymore."

I mean absolutely none and absolutely all of what I have just said.

Edward shakes his head. "Liar. What's going on with you tonight? What's wrong?" And now he's standing over me, and the ceiling feels closer than ever.

"What's wrong?" I repeat incredulously. "Edward, everything feels too heavy," I sigh. "Everything feels too much. I'm—I feel—_everything._"

I've never felt so present in my life. I am every moment we've ever spent together, every lie we've ever told, everyone before him and after him, every song he's ever loved and every lyric I've ever lived by… "Oh God,Edward… I am decades, I am decades, I am _decades_…"

And he leaves me, briefly, to find my copy of _Closer_. I should have known he wouldn't be able to resist this; "Decades" is playing, Edward is urgently fast-forwarding to my favorite part, and Ian is reminding the two of us that our _hearts lost forever can't replace the fear, or the thrill of the chase_. And the ceiling is lifting, slowly.

And then, Edward's crawling on top of me, and this weight seems to make the others weightless. And he looks at me, really looks at me, to say, for all the decades I am:

"_We_ are centuries."

xxx

And it begins the way everything begins, and it ends the way everything ends. But slowly. And there's this odd sadness to kissing her, as if she's giving away something it hurts her to lose, and her eyes are closed the whole time.

Eyes open. This is where, usually, Rosalie starts counting. Maybe it's to block her own thoughts out, a safeguard against my prying mind, or maybe it's just dread. She's counting down the seconds until those first silence-breaking words; she never says them first.

But looking at her, looking up, analyzing the blankness of the ceiling with a persistence measured by the ticking seconds, I cannot help but want to bring her back to earth. I want to reclaim her from everywhere she has been, everyone she has been with. "Rosalie," I whisper, and the method is not original. Her head turns but slightly, and she looks at me with that consistent question: Is this "Rosalie" to say "leave" or "stay" or "never tell," is it to say "goodbye" or something far more permanent? We have always proved our goodbyes untrue. Is he confirming that I am _something_, or is this but a gentle reminder that I am a stand-in, some possessive or qualifier preceding the name—that I am Emmett's, or that I am family, or that I am ruined.

Tonight, it is none of these. "Rosalie," my hands on her shoulders, my lips in her hair. This, closeness that—for all the fuss she makes over its absence—I think she's hiding from. "Rosalie, promise me you're mine."

xxx

Crash. And I'm on earth again.

And it was already too much when he was kissing my neck and holding my hands and making believe that for one night we could be kismet, but now the selfishness of this proposed commitment, when this is what he assured me we would never have. And if I've ever wanted to have him, it has never been in this way: not to be Edward's Rosalie, and not for him to be Rosalie's Edward. I only wanted the mere acknowledgement that we are an us to some extent, and that there can be no issue of control or power, simply because we cannot control ourselves and in the presence of this attraction, we are powerless. Surrender to the situation, perhaps. Not to each other. Because I would surrender first.

"You told me not to promise you anything."

xxx

She's shrugging off my kisses. My forward advances are being rebuffed, when I could have sworn this was what she wanted. And maybe I never should have kissed her, because _you can make love to me because you're not in love with me _is streaming through her head. But doesn't she want this feeling?

And she's cold. Usually, it's only after one of us gets dressed that she's like this. It takes a buttoned-up shirt or a shrugged-on coat to end the scene, to arrest the stage personas, to send us back to real life. But now, reality has set in so fast. But didn't she? Didn't she once want this feeling?

We've fought before. We always fight. But her body is fighting me now, and she has never done this before. And can't she be satisfied with the eye of the storm? That in everything else we are a collision, and in this we are a completion, and for these moments there is nothing outside of us? And this is smaller and greater than she thinks; I would not ask her for her days, and I would not steal that life from her. But I would ask her to let me have these nights, honestly and utterly and completely.

"Promise me this," I say.

xxx

Are we pretending? Am I supposed to wrap my arms around him, all sweetness and joy, and confess to him that this is all I've ever wanted? My paper-heart fantasies of Valentine boxes and high school sweethearts are not to be realized, and I resent the half-hearted attempt. Samantha Baker and Jake Ryan never happened.

And does he want to expand this sordid peace between us to encompass all hours of the night and not these few breathless minutes? Some carrot on a stick, to say: maybe one day, the _entire _day could be ours? It can't. Hopelessly romantic lies become less beautiful when confronted with eternity. We're not in love, we're just in bed. And day has to break sometime.

Everything feels heavy again.

"No," I say.

xxx

She says this often, but not when I'm kissing her. "Rosalie—"

"No, Edward," she says, "you're being ridiculous."

"Why are you doing this?" And suddenly the anger rushes out of my mouth like a cannonball into the ocean, a loud and clumsy accident, and when her body seizes up, I feel the ripple effects in my fingertips. Softly now: "Why can't we just… be together?" Even for this little while, why can't we be near each other without wanting to destroy each other?

"_Because_," she says, a serrated edge to her voice, and this _because_ is fifty-two years old—seventy even, "you treat melike I'm _disposable, _Edward. _Because_ you make me fragile, and when you touch me with your cold hands, I'm like glass shattering in an icebox. _Because _we're not going anywhere, Edward, and I don't want you to pretend that we are. _Because _you don't deserve my promises, and I'm not going to lie to you as easily as you lie to me."

_Because the wind is high, it blows my mind. _Just blows my mind.

She's looking at her hands, at mine—in her mind, the situation abruptly seems criminal. "Because I _hate_ this," she says, "and this should have been over a long a time ago. Because you treat me like shit, and I won't stand for it."

Laughter and anger are my immediate reactions. "But you'll lie down for it."

Mistake mistake mistake mistake.

Sometimes I can't decide what the worst thing we ever did to each other was. But in this moment, on this bed, Rosalie thinks it is this.

"_Get out_," clutching the sheets against herself, all of a sudden offended that I should see her like this.

"Rosalie, I didn't—you know I didn't mean that—"

She's out of the bed now, and her eyes are dark pools of disdain, disgust, disillusionment. And then, with the resolve and composure I've come to expect of her at any time but this—no, not stripped bare in front of me, and not after what we have just done, never like this—she stares at me. Her eyes have shut off. Calmly, with venom:

"Never touch me again."

xxx

Decade of a Thousand Bad Decisions (Flashback Flashforward Mix)

"Candy Says," The Velvet Underground, _The Velvet Underground_

"I Can't Get No Satisfaction," Cat Power, _The Covers Record_

"These Days," Nico, _Chelsea__ Girls_

"Crazy for You," Madonna, _Vision Quest_

"Decades," Joy Division, _Closer_

"Sleep Tonight," Stars, _Set Yourself on Fire_

"Because," The Beatles, _Abbey Road_

"It's All Over," Broken Family Band, _Alone in the Makeout Room_

xxx

* * *

**A/N:** I seriously thought about titling this chapter _Candy Says, "I Can't Get No Satisfaction These Days."_ Thoughts, questions, concerns, read, review?


	3. Chapter 3

_Three_

_

* * *

_

**1987**

I can't read minds, but Edward's is easy. He's reading _Brideshead Revisited_, which translates roughly into mopey ruminations on disaster, nostalgia, and repression—but that's always Edward, so it hardly counts. He's wearing his tortoiseshell reading glasses, which I will never tell him is sexy, but which he knows. That's half of the reason he wears them—the other half: it makes his ridiculous angst feel literary.

He shifts uncomfortably in his chair, because my thoughts are too loud and too close and being this near to me is killing him. _Which is too bad because I'm not moving_. He takes a deeply unnecessary breath and grips the armrest, and I know that right now, Edward is thinking about doing _terrible_ things to me on this sofa.

He seizes up, clamping the book shut. I suppose he hadn't thought of that yet.

Oops.

But who am I kidding? I'm not the one who should be apologizing.

_Slam. _And the book hits the glass table between us. "How many times have I said I'm sorry?"

"I stopped counting a year and a half ago."

"How can I make this up to you?" he asks, hands clutching the table-side.

"Edward, there's only one way you can think of to make it up to me, and that of all things will not fix this."

I won't pretend that this sort of forgiveness hasn't occurred to me—that a great feeling will burst spontaneously from him someday, and that its heartfelt honesty will break like a wave over us both and absolve us of our mutual sins. But we should've figured out ages ago that absolution through sex isn't in the scripture of any major religion. And we're never honest about it.

The alternatives to sex as an emotional Etch-a-Sketch include such implausible possibilities as: That Edward will one day rip my bedroom door off its hinges and demand a return to _the way we were_ (even though 1973 was hardly a good year for us, since I started being obsessed with Woody Allen, and he started hating films in general). Or maybe if he'd started writing me painstakingly romantic letters every day, he would have eventually hit upon an actual sentiment, realizing that the "Rosalie, how could you give up such fantastic sex?" argument is only so compelling. Or maybe an elaborate mix tape of emotions, maybe if he'd dig inside the meaning of "Decades" and actually listen to the song instead of just playing it over and over again, hoping that through our walls, just the memory will breach my defenses. Because that is the wrong night, and the wrong song, to remind me of why… so many why-nots in the melody… and we're not Pyramus and Thisbe, and Edward needs to start thinking outside the box of mythology and prose. And maybe if he would only burst out with actions and not his carefully-crafted words, I could weigh the strength of his conviction in whatever he's fighting me for.

Edward furrows his brow, rethinking strategy. "I—"

_You_ are the problem.

"Edward, you've searched my mind, and I've learned languages to keep you out, and you have learned those too, and you know that I can't want _anything_ from you."

He leaps on this. "Can't. Not don't."

"You're good at semantics, Edward."

"Don't mock me."

"That's your favorite thing about me. No one else mocks you and means it."

He considers this for a second, before gripping his knees, leaning towards me. "I'm in love with you."

I'm in control enough that I don't suck in the breath I want to. "You've never been in love with anyone."

"But I'm in love with you," he says. Has he ever said anything like this before? Without first writing several treatises on love and affection, love and responsibility, love and death, love and consequences? Has he been doing the required reading? His library card's been sitting on the kitchen counter for the past week; he can't possibly be in love with me.

"That must be difficult for you."

Edward gets this look sometimes that is somewhere between throwing himself at my feet, pinning me to the nearest flat surface, and punching me in the stomach. His mind arrives at "Please."

"Please what? I can't read minds, Edward."

"_Damn it_, Rosalie." There we go. Punching me in the stomach. "Please—please come back." Throwing himself at my feet.

"Oh, but I'm right here, Edward."

"I _miss_ you." Pinning me to the nearest flat surface.

"That's not what you miss."

_Growl. _"_That too_," he admits grudgingly. "But I do miss you. You won't speak to me—this doesn't count. And I can't understand why you're being so petty. You seem to hate me, to despise the sight of me, and yet when everyone else is gone, you're here, torturing me with these thoughts—"

"I'm thinking your own thoughts back to you, aren't I?"

Edward smiles a bit. "Yes."

"Then you're torturing yourself." I get up, smooth my skirt, pick the book off of the quaking table and drop it into Edward's lap. "But you're good at that."

"There's a lot of things I'm good at, Rosalie," he says.

"Not true," I counter. "You're out of practice."

xxx

I spend a lot of time in record stores lately, just to get out of the house. I'm listening to a lot of old stuff, but avoiding the old mix-tapes like the plague, because I'm trying to break the masochistic habit of listening to Edward's Don't Get Married Mix. I don't know why, maybe just to guilt me into things, but he periodically updates it—and laughs about it. "I'm definitely adding to 'If You Leave' to your Don't Get Married Mix," he'll say, his voice oscillating between sardonic and scathing and scathed. And sometimes he yells at me about it, and tells me I've ruined him, and I say we're both ruined, and I usually throw his mix-tapes back at him while he calls me a child. So you see why I've been spending a lot of time in record stores lately. I desperately need new music, since all the old stuff is tainted.

I don't know why it was music, why music was the catalyst of all our interactions, and every battlefield was a vinyl record or a blank cassette. But it was probably because Edward spends about five hours every day making love to his piano. I sort of wanted to see if he had an ear for anything else; I wanted to test his limits. And granted, he's made adequate progress, but his musical tendencies still lean more towards crying music than anything else. Crying, however, is _strictly off limits_. I hate sitting on his bed listening to like, The Smiths, for three hours knowing that I am not the subject of his _Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want_s and that he yearns _only_ for the philosophical and the impossible. I wish this silly record store had some Stone Roses.

"You two need to talk," Jasper says, standing over me. Scrutinizing my music choices not because of any obstinate music snobbery, but as an attempt to gauge some type of rationale behind my unruly emotions. I do so deeply appreciate the vagueness of Jasper's gifts. Edward would be making some vicious "Stone Roses" crack right now.

"Mm," I say noncommittally. "Right. But I hate him."

"That's not what it feels like," he says, and I immediately feel terrible for exposing him to the violent storm of emotions between us. It must be like being repeatedly socked in the soul.

"Jasper. This is how it works. _I hate him _until he apologizes properly. If I forgive him, and I go crawling back to him, he's never going to understand how deeply I despise him even if I want to throw myself at him whenever he so much as scratches his nose."

"What?"

"He has to work for it," I say. "He hasn't earned it."

Jasper puts his hand on my shoulder. "Rosalie," he says, his voice low—as if he is very vocally trying to communicate with me on another level, "he is tearing himself apart."

"Well, tell him to call me when he gets to the center."

This elicits a heavy sigh from Jasper, who turns to presumably go find some Bob Dylan to play in the car.

The Stone Roses. Exactly.

xxx

We used to hang out by the water. In the earlier days, that was almost all she wanted to do. She used to think about drowning _all the time_, wondering what would happen if she let the waves consume her, if that would somehow negate her undead state. She'd spend hours in the shower, and I'd sit at the bathroom door—_knowing_ (I knew this, I knew this) she couldn't hurt herself, terrified she would. And I'd picture Carlisle and Esme, so sure they'd failed her, unable to cry the necessary tears—always guilty—and me the most guilty of all, knowing it was happening—

So I took her to the gorge by Genessee River.

"What if I fell," she would ask, on that ragged edge with me, the snarling wind whipping around us. "If I fell and no one caught me—if I were dashed to pieces, would I die?"

And I would say what was still so difficult for both of us. "We can't die, Rosalie. We're already dead."

And she would take off her dress (I would start literally shaking, every time, wanting to reprimand her for her immodesty, her thoughtlessness, but I could never find the words), and she would stand at the edge, and—

She didn't know she wasn't going to die. I knew this. But she was standing on the edge of a cliff, arms spread-eagled, eyes forward, waiting to meet the rocks and the water… and I _knew_ she wasn't going to die. But I grabbed her hand.

"Please don't do this," I said—and she stared at me, confused. _Had I deigned to touch her, and why, and how could I move to save her if there was nothing to save her from? _ "You're dead. We're immortal. That's all there is."

"Edward," she said, giving my own hand back to me, pressing it against my pounding, thumping, aching chest. "Let me fall."

xxx

I used to jump off cliffs. Maybe that's morbid. I can't decide. In any case, I've since picked up other bad habits. The largest part of me feels like watching something crash today, and if it can't be Edward's XK-140 into a tree, it might as well be waves into rocks, feeling my limbs crash into the ocean… it's like feeling my heart beat again.

_What don't I mind ruining today?_

Picking through my closet for jeans Edward's ruined before, that I don't mind ruining again. It always used to be dresses, primarily because it was 1933 (and '34 and '35… and then Edward and I stopped meeting by the water), but also because of the look on his face. The fastest way to make Edward's heart stop and restart is to take off a dress. He wants to think it's poetry or Proust, that nothing moves him like a sonata—but his heart never becomes nearly audible except when we're stripped to the bone, when he's in his socks and I'm in my shoes.

Goddamnit. What shoes you do wear to fall off a cliff?

xxx

She's sneaking out again. I feel like shutting down when I hear her window close.

xxx

This is why I was against moving to Hoquiam. The only decent cliff near this wasted town is Brackenridge Bluff—Rochester at least had a few gorges, a waterfall, Chimney Bluffs and Lake Ontario at night. I never used to get salt in my hair; now Edward (and Emmett, Emmett, Emmett…) tastes it on my lips, feels it in my hands…

I need to drown. Far enough away now, on the highway, that I can think this (not quite out loud, but audible to my own mind); at home, Edward starts every time my mind veers towards the seaside, because he's possessive of my thoughts in a way he shouldn't be. He doesn't have to worry: It's not the suffocation that I'm after; I only want to feel myself stop fighting.

You drown until you stop fighting, and then you float up, for police departments to find. I crash into the surface—a thrashing tumble of limbs. (I don't jackknife, because what's the point? I cannonball.) I crash, I thrash, I gasp out of habit, I sink, I am silent. Have you ever heard your body go silent?

I float.

I float, I climb, I crash. Again and again. And when my body is quiet—not silent, but quiet, quieter than it is in that house, around him and _him_ and everyone—I go home.

I go home and I shower. I know Edward still listens at the door, and I let him. It makes him feel better, and I am quiet—there is nothing left to hide from him—and this relative quiet makes him think I am fine. And when I am no longer fine, I go back to the water, and _this_ is the problem with Hoquiam: that I am _not_ fine, I am almost never fine, and Brackenridge Bluff is _barely fifty feet above sea-level_ and without the spikes and spires that used to wear me out, break me down, and shut my body up. So getting quiet today is going to take a while.

xxx

"Hey, man."

"Hey, _man?_"

"If you're going to be a dick, I can leave," Jasper says, and he's right. I've been fists-clenched, brow-furrowed all day, and _Brideshead_ isn't doing anything about it. Cracking the spine of an Evelyn Waugh novel can't make me stop replaying the sound of her creaking window, the vision of her disappearing from view, wondering when… wondering how she's going to… she's going to… "Edward, what's going on?" Jasper asks.

Jasper knows exactly what's going on. Because it would require willful ignorance on his part not to. He felt it the moment he showed up on our doorstep in 1950, and I was aware of his knowledge instantaneously—Rosalie knew from the look on my face. Her reaction was, in hindsight, unsurprising. She asked Jasper who was winning.

"I worry, Jasper," I murmur. "You know I do."

Jasper is silent for a moment, cracking his knuckles. My reply is unsatisfactory, relying on the fact that I know he must know how I feel, even if he doesn't understand it. He wishes I were straightforward; he recognizes that I am nothing like Rosalie. She yells to hide how she feels—I retreat into pronouns and vague pronouncements. The problem with Rosalie is containing her, but he has to draw me out.

I don't think this is true.

Jasper stands up and says, in his characteristic drawl: "Then put your book in a drawer, get off your ass, and do something about it. She's not complicated."

See, I don't think this is true either.

"Look, man, you humiliated her," he says softly, as if he had been there. His tone of voice makes me suspicious once again that he has always liked her better than me, and that she confides in him. That he is the only one in this house capable of being a brother to her, and this has made him wary of me. His tone of voice makes me sure that he knows everything not only because of gifts and instincts, but because she has told him, and it makes wish that Rosalie and I had even for one moment managed to be friends. "She's like you," Jasper says, "—she won't forget it. And she won't forgive you until—"

"Christ. How badly do I have to embarrass myself?"

Jasper smiles. "I think if you made a complete ass of yourself, she might give you five minutes."

"Get everyone out of the house. I don't want witnesses."

xxx

I am contemplating just throwing my diving clothes away when I hear it. Rocks on my window. Which is a _joke_. A joke from a teen romantic comedy (in fifteen minutes, I should probably take off my glasses, let down my hair, and express my undying affection for my childhood best friend). When the pebbles hit the glass, I think of all he's done to beak into this space—fists on doors, music through walls, and damn him if he doesn't know a Slavic language when he hears it. He's always had an unwelcome talent for breaking into my thoughts—and I learned Russian to get away from him.

If he's waiting underneath my windowsill to make some flowery, dramatic speech about redemption, I might just—

"NEVER GONNA GIVE YOU UP!"

_Oh my God. _

I drop my damp, tattered T-shirt on the floor and walk over to the window. "Edward?"

"NEVER GONNA LET YOU DOWN!" At this, I press open the window. Edward is shouting this hoarsely in my direction, barely recognizable in his oversized tan trench coat, black turtleneck, and Wayfarer sunglasses. God, he's doing the dance and everything. "NEVER GONNA RUN AROUND—"

I reflexively clench my jaw to keep the corners of my mouth from turning upwards. "_What are you doing?_"

"Rose! COME DOWN."

My entire body pauses for a moment, weighing the costs and benefits of crawling out of this window now or making him twist in the wind for a little while longer. "Finish the chorus!" I shout.

While Edward continues his voice-crackingly delightful Rick Astley serenade, I question whether or not—in our fifty-four years of breaking bed frames together—he has ever before made me so _unabashedly _laugh.

"I've never been on the other side of this window," he says after my feet hit the grass. He momentarily has that distant look on his face, one that I am deeply and unfortunately familiar with—as if he is not in this moment, but outside of it, framing it in his hands before he takes it apart. "You always—"

"Edward," I say, putting my hands up like parallel lines in front of his face, "this is how short your leash is. No metaphors tonight."

He laughs, and laughing is good because laughing is _here. _"Okay. It wasn't going to be a metaphor, actually. It was going to be symbolism, but I can be unsubtle tonight, if you're into that."

My curiosity is instantly piqued—Edward has never met a literary allusion he didn't immediately want incorporate into his life philosophy. "Oh, really? How unsubtle?"

"Like _listening to the radio_ unsubtle."

"But Edward, how will you feel ever validated if we're _just like everyone else?_"

The house is uncharacteristically quiet and still, and these are the nights we used to wait for—when everyone else's hungers accommodated our own. Strange for us, in the midst of this silence, to speak.

"I don't know," Edward shrugs, his shoulders scraping the windowpane behind him. "REO Speedwagon might have some ideas."

I resist the urge to chortle. "So this is your plan. This is your 'make Rosalie forgive you plan?' You're going to be cheesy and act like a total dork and we're going to listen to the radio?"

"Well yeah," Edward grins. "Because the radio's in my Jag."

"Shut up. You're not going to seduce me with a _car_, Edward," I protest, walking towards the driveway all the same.

He's actually taken the Jaguar out of the garage tonight, which for Edward is like the equivalent of taking a Stradivarius out of its glass case for the purpose of playing "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" to a pet goldfish. Part of me thinks _he's serious_, and part of me thinks _he's buying me_, and all of me _really wants to hear that engine growl._

"Maybe not a stationary one," he says, unlocking the side door and slipping into the driver's seat. "Hop in," he says, patting the passenger seat like the dirty tease he is.

"So tempted, but—"

He throws the tan trench coat into the backseat. "Oh come on, Rosalie. This drop head coupe XK140 just doesn't do it for you anymore? These lines don't just _scream_ sex to you?"

I think about my resolutions to reclaim the word _no, _the walls that I have fortified over the past sixteen months and whether or not I'm open to the idea of letting Edward scale them—or rather, drive into them with a 1956 sports car. Whether or not the purr of some British automobile could possibly roar louder in my head than his words (the words he says, and the words I know he thinks)—or if all I really care about is a more distant roar, the roar of when we were bobcats and lionesses. And whether or not I want us to drive out into the woods of 1933.

_Damn it_.

"I'm driving," I say.

xxx

"Rose, how am I supposed to make you fall in love with me if I'm not allowed to philosophize?"

"Turn up the radio," she says, gripping the steering wheel with the tenacity with which she approaches every challenge—her absolute ecstasy is screaming in my mind when we make the first turn. I'm sure she thinks the Billboard music chart is actually pardon enough for the silent sins between us, but it makes me nervous that I'm at a loss for words and all she wants to do is drive. "Christ, this car makes me want to do things," she whispers.

_God, Rose._

I clear my throat. "Elaborate?"

"You wish," she laughs, whipping around another curve. She's reckless, but she handles it well. "Where are we going?"

"Left here," I say. We're wandering wending roads down by the high school from which we have just graduated, and Rose is humming _take on me, take me on_, hitting high notes in her head. "And then another left at the next light." If we drive aimlessly for long enough, I think I can put my thoughts together to her satisfaction.

"Wait—is this a period radio, Edward?" she asks.

"Turn onto the highway, and yes, of course."

Rosalie makes an incomprehensible, primal noise. "I think I just saw God. And this is with the Borg Warner transmission?"

Too many things to say and too much ground to cover and too many sentiments pressing on my voice box to continue discussing the parts I had to place and replace to make this car sing for her. "Rosalie, can we talk about something other than your love affair with my car?"

"This car might just be the best thing about you, Edward." She's silent for a moment. "I would have been scared to touch it—to put the radio in. It's European, right? And then the tape deck—you didn't have to put a tape deck in. It would have been—"

"Of course I had to put a tape deck in, Rose."

She sighs, easing up on the accelerator, settling into a calmer speed. "Okay. Go. You want to. Start. But if anything you say sounds like Tolstoy, I will remove things from your body through your throat."

"God, you're a _gem_."

"Your leash is not made of sarcasm."

Suddenly everything opens, like a fresh cut against an old wound. "I don't know how to tell you I love you without you thinking I'm trying to hurt you. I know you think that's what I get out of this—us—that I get to… hurt something with no consequences… but I think about you all the time. You're a consequence. You're the only consequence."

She floors it, and the streetlamp-lit silhouettes beside us blur into oblivion.

"_Jesus, _Rose, I know you hate it when I talk, but—"

"But do you know _why?_ Your words are _weapons_, and that's it."

Coming from her—I have to stop myself from shouting _this_ _coming from her_, Rosalie and her whispered obscenities and innuendoes, her dares and taunts and invitations, and every time she's ever said "touch me," "break me," "kiss me, kiss me, kiss me."

Instead I say: "How could _I love you_ be a weapon?"

And she says: "Oh, what do you love, Edward? Is it that I cry or is that I crumble? Or that when we're together we destroy things—and that connects you to something mysterious or poetic? You love me, or you love what I do for you, or you love the things I make you feel and un-feel?" She pulls over abruptly and the car jerks to a halt on the side of the highway.

I look at her and the fierceness in her eyes, and that unwavering fire in her, and I understand that she has to know what an inferno she is.

"No one has ever made me feel worse than you, and I love you still. I love you in spite of the fact that you're the worst decision I could make, not because of it," I turn down the music, and the melancholy melodies of The Church gently fade away, everything they've murmured about _loveless fascination _lingering heavy in the air between us. "Christ. You're awful, Rosalie. Those first years… I thought I was losing my mind. You can't know… you can't know the chaos it was, because I couldn't tell you, and words weren't what you wanted from me… but it drove me up a wall, wanting you. I was done for. And then you got married, and I thought it would stop, and it couldn't."

The slightest movement, the smallest twitch in her ring finger is her way of acknowledging this.

"And then Alice and Jasper, and we swore we would stop, and we couldn't. And Rose, if we keep trying to rip ourselves away from each other and keep finding it impossible, damn it maybe we should just fucking be together and_ fuck everything else_."

Rosalie presses her back into the leather seat of the Jaguar and reaches out to turn the radio back on. I won't look into her mind, I won't. She fiddles with the volume until The Cure has pressed its way into our night, and then she turns to me. Silently, she closes the space between us, and the air feels electric. She presses her lips against my ear, she puts her arms around my neck and says: " 'Show me how you do that trick. The one that makes me scream.'"

xxx

When We Were Jaguars_  
_

"I Think We're Alone Now (Tiffany Cover)," The Spinto Band, _Moonwink_

"Drive My Car," Breakfast Club, _License to Drive  
_

"There Is A Light That Never Goes Out," The Smiths, _The Queen is Dead_

"Take On Me," A-Ha, _Hunting High and Low_

"Don't Dream It's Over," Crowded House, _Crowded House_

"Under the Milky Way," The Church, _Starfish_

"Just Like Heaven," The Cure, _Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me_

xxx

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**A/N:** Soft spot for eighties music and dysfunction. Review me your thoughts. Plus a random question: Your ideally cast Rosalie and Edward (Jasper, Emmett)? (My imagination has trouble with blondes.)**  
**


	4. Chapter 4

_Four_

_

* * *

_

**2003**

And it is such a mistake to have her here, lying on my bed, nose buried in my notebooks, scratching out the names of albums that have accompanied us to now, in the dim light of October, far away from each other. It is such a mistake to be near her now, when I haven't touched her in months. Longer than months.

"Are you sure about 'There Is A Light?'" she asks, flexing and un-flexing her calves.

"Yeah, of course. Why?"

She shifts and sighs, rustling her white dress. "I don't know—it's a little weepy. '87 wasn't _weepy_."

"Not for you."

"This is where I should say sorry, but I'm not going to."

"You don't have to," I tell her, drumming my fingers on the chair to which I made a necessary relocation. "And it's not weepy. All the things about houses and homes, driving out into the night—that's us."

"Well, the death wish. That's you."

"Right. Remind me—who threw themselves of a cliff that afternoon? You're just as bad as I am." Rose puts her thumb in her mouth and scrunches her nose. She's wondering how I knew, that irrational concern she has about keeping secrets from me—she still wants the right to it, to hide things that don't matter from me. "You, um… the salt on your lips and I heard you sneak out."

She looks down immediately, and reaches for the first thing she can lay her hands on—the pen she was writing with. "Right, whatever." She returns to making her mark on my possessions, writing _The Smiths_ out in her flowery script. We should keep separate notebooks for this—that, at least, would keep her out of my bedroom—but we have volumes upon volumes now, and it would be impractical. But her crawling over me in the night to get to the blank pages of the books in my nightstand… it's untenable. Her justifications ("I thought of a new one—I didn't want to forget") when I've been lying there in the dark thinking about _God what else_—they make me ache.

"You can have The Smiths if I can throw some Stars into this situation," she says, glossing over the implications of our conversations the way she straightens the covers.

"Are you thinking 'One More Night' or 'Sleep Tonight?'"

"Oh please, Edward. 'One More Night' isn't '87, it's '01." A whistle of breath. It's this thing she does—she sucks the air back in, as if attempting to rewind these few seconds and recapture the words before they crawl through my ear canal into my head. I can tell she wants to dive in after them. "Mm, Canada was fun, wasn't it?" she says.

"Uh, yeah." Canada was torture. Rose thinks our road trips are fun, but she could make me crash the car with a look, and our excuse felt flimsy even though it was true. _Rosalie here wants the new Stars album, and she can't wait the whole six months for it to come out here, so I'm going to drive our little princess to Vancouver. With any luck, she won't become infatuated with the rearview mirror on the way there._

"Don't act like I _made_ you come with me—you wanted your little indie leg up on the Seattle set too," she grins, rolling over, arching her back into my bedspread. The smile I had planned is interrupted by her dress and her legs and her skin and _God, God, God—_"What is your _deal_, Gloomy Pants?" she snaps, eyes up at me. "You're totally the Sullen Cullen today."

Inhale. "Have you been working on that long? It's cute."

It's important to acknowledge Rosalie's snarkiness from time to time, or else she begins to complain that I'm ignoring her and that we're fading.

"Thanks—I thought you'd appreciate it. But seriously. Consciousness? Have you heard of it? _Practice it_."

"Rose, I'm going to go… hunting. I'm going to go on a hunt," I say, rising from my chair. Sunset wanderings have become habitual, sometimes resulting in a dead deer, other times not. I've got her convinced that I've recently developed an unshakable thirst, which can only be slaked by near constant trips to the woods—a thirst that inspires in me so consummate a selfishness that I must hunt alone. She's pissed about it, but she accepts it. And lately, she's as wary of our history of nature walks as I am.

"Fine. While you're gone, I'm going to rearrange your CDs in order of weepiness, and when you get back, we're going to discuss why Muse is not the answer."

"Muse is not—" I stop myself from launching into this debate again. "I'm leaving. I'm gone."

xxx

The effort it takes me to tear myself away from the doorframe is unsettling. The moment I'm across the hall, down the stairs, out the front door, I sense it—the way a sudden temperature shift feels as you leave the heavy air of a stuffy room, sensations I don't encounter anymore—I feel the weight of the frustration that is inherent in time spent with Rosalie. I want to throw her out of my bedroom, out of the window, into bed, my arms around her, myself off of something steep. I want, and that is all I do, and she speaks and I strain to listen only to her words, never crossing boundaries constructed in haste those months (now years?) ago. It's only when she pries into my mind with her thoughts (they feel like challenges, every one)—_convince me_—that I betray this distance of ours.

Emmett is strolling up the front walk, and God, this feels convenient, but I don't mean to leave the moment he returns. It's not about her. I wonder if she was joking about staying up in my room, and if it's normal for her to be in my bedroom alone or at all, or if we're supposed to be fighting, and how this seems to everyone else. She'll say she's doing it to infuriate me, and I will return and be infuriated, and we won't speak for a week. That will either be an excuse that she's constructed or that I have, and I won't know whether we should thank each other or curse ourselves.

"Hey," Emmett says, with that easy smile. But, of course, for him nothing is different after dark.

"Hi," I reply, shoving my hands in my pockets. "I'm going on a hunt." I nod back to the upstairs light behind us. "Make sure Rose doesn't sneak into my room and glue everything to the ceiling while I'm gone?"

Emmett runs a hand through his hair with a sort of bemused grin—like he's been observing the indecipherable antics of a foreign species for so long that their actions, while inexplicable, are familiar. Comforting, even. "Man, I don't know why she feels the need to screw with you all the time. Different senses of humor or something, I guess. I'll keep her out of your room."

I want to grab his hand, extract a blood oath to this effect, but I nod and continue walking, shouting "see you in a few" at his retreating back.

_He is going home to his wife_. That thought still impresses me somehow. She is his, she _belongs_ to him—though Rosalie would object to these terms, adamant that she belongs to no one because Rose speaks in negations—_never promise you anything, never pursue anything, I've been encouraged never to feel anything_. Every new no speaks to yesterday's no and the sequence of denials from decades ago. _ I don't, I never_, and almost never _I can't._ Two of the many words Rose holds in the pit of her stomach. In the pit of my stomach, in the back of my throat: Wife. There was almost certainly a time when that concept meant something to me.

I'm not thirsty. That was something else. I veer away from the woods and onto the road, walking with an aimless certainty until diner lights sneak up on me. There's this Norman Rockwell painting that Rosalie despises, and it reminds me of that. _Nighthawks. _Some bored redhead at the counter, making idle conversation with some well-dressed guy with a head full of such ideas, and some shadowy character off to the side, reading between the lines of his palms.

I think I'll sit down for a while. When Rose sneaks off to Madonna concerts to feel what's felt by the youth she's supposed to embody, I sneak off to run-down diners to feel all the intangibles.

Tangibly: sticky counters, dim and flickering lights, grimy napkin dispensers, and waiters with surly faces, stuck working the night shift. This place is filled with late night stragglers—college students and truck drivers, whose lives begin now, in the small hours. I slide into a booth, counting the minutes until one of those surly faces turns towards me.

"What can I get for you?"

"Um… a black coffee." The waiter looks at me expectantly. "That's it."

He wanders away and my attention wanders across the yellow lights and tables painted to resemble wood to the booth in front of me. A girl, maybe nineteen or twenty, in a grey sweatshirt whose sleeves swallow her tiny hands, curly brown hair, glasses. She's beaming. "I can't explain it," she says, directing her joyously trembling voice towards the angular blonde across from her. "I just… this is going to sound so cheesy… but I've never felt this way before."

I sense from the slight tilt of her head, the twitch of her left cheek, that the blonde has delivered some variation on a smile in return—no teeth, but maybe an upturned corner of her mouth. She is silent, and then, flatly: "I bet."

"We've known each other for maybe four… five days. But it feels _so _much longer than five days." She pushes the sleeves of her sweatshirt above her elbows and reaches for the sugar shaker. "Like, I fell asleep at his place last night—" Here, she pauses, perhaps registering a reaction. "I fell asleep at his place, and like, I was so comfortable sleeping there, you know? And normally I would have been worried, right? But I woke up in his arms, and I wasn't even fazed by it."

"Wow," whispers her companion. A mixture of genuine emotion and the same flatness from before, either muted feeling or artificially amplified.

"I know. _I know_," says the brunette, pouring sugar into her coffee. "I've just. I've just never felt anything like this before."

The blonde rakes her hand through her hair, puts the thumbnail of her free hand in her mouth, and slouches forward in the booth. "Yeah. Me either."

The brunette continues, confessing to confessions never uttered aloud before ("You know I never let anyone read my poetry, right? But he was so supportive"), the blonde nodding along. The girl in the grey sweatshirt explains: the sudden need to pour life stories into each other's hands, the habits and tendencies even secret to _herself_ that he has discovered and elected to love, an accelerated attachment outside of control (but no desire to control it), the kind of _I don't want to slow down_ feeling she's only ever seen in romance novels and foreign films. _Un_ _coup de foudre_. The jokes constructed for two are translated for a third party, and the effort to communicate this overwhelming nascent feeling is unrelenting but only minimally successful. The blonde's line of sight appears to be askew, aimed at her friend's ear, or maybe her shoulder. She alternates between her whispered _wow_, mumbled affirmations, and _who am I to say…_

I am not conscious of my rapt attention until the brunette stops speaking. "Wow. I'm sorry. I've been talking about myself this whole time. What's going on with you?"

"Oh, nothing," the blonde replies, her voice very, very small.

Her exhale creates a vacuum, and it feels familiar. I've never felt this way before either. It was something I'd designated as impossible or unattainable, reserved for great artists and thinkers, those capable of great feeling. Shelley must have felt this way, Debussy surely—this is something that Bronte understood, Nabokov, and Morrissey. I have gone about it backwards, reading the literature to develop a knack for the feeling, anticipating that one day I will have the opportunity to surrender to this insurmountable feeling and that I must study for it. But I doubt this nineteen year old has read one line of Shelley, gives a damn about Debussy.

Whatever I can say about Rosalie and I, we did not fall into this. It did not overtake us. Not at first, not for a long while. This is not to say that it _does_ not, but rather that it _did not_—she danced around my mind for months in an uncertain way, we broke branches in fumbling ecstasy for years with no acknowledgment, she fled from me and I from her, and we returned to each other in hazes of desire, but our descent into love was not steady. We were unaffected by gravity. We did not pick up speed or accept the conventions of direction—we began to fall for each other and struggled against physics to avoid it. Rose and I, we were a fight, not a freefall. We still are. It is not safe otherwise. We would hit the ground.

So I have never felt this, what this wide-eyed brunette describes. Feeling yourself slide perfectly, frictionless, into place beside another person. If Rosalie and I were ever pieces of a jigsaw, we've thrown the puzzle pieces across the room in frustration so many times that the cardboard has frayed, irreparable. We fit, we cannot fit otherwise, but it will never be easy.

Easiness and thoughtlessness, I feel that yearning in her constantly, for this simplicity. She sneaks out of the house to look for it, she finds it in the way Emmett looks at her, and if I remember the outlines of her old thoughts correctly, she was jealous of him for it. Rose tries to love the way she is loved, but she cannot love Emmett the way he loves her, because she cannot understand it. I feel both satisfied and grief-stricken every time I realize this.

_Well, we're destined_.

_Well, we're broken._

_xxx_

He is in his handwriting, so I'm looking at his books. Our books, technically. Because Edward is a pretentious jackass who can only walk if he follows in the footsteps of Hemmingway, he only writes in those slim black notebooks that "artists" in Parisian coffee shops carry. One of their pleasing attributes (granted, not ten-dollars-worth of pleasing) is the lack of lines—they accommodate both my script and his, in their varying slants and sizes. I'm flipping through the notebook for '93, which is suddenly ten years ago, remembering with a guilty smile the beginnings of my Liz Phair Manifesto, nights when I made Edward take me out to really shitty diners and buy me sodas. ("Rose, you can't drink soda." "Sure, I can. It'll just be uncomfortable. Tonight you're going to write me letters and buy me sodas.") I listened to a lot of Hole, some Beck, a little Harvey Danger, and Edward became obsessed with his Radiohead. And sometimes, in those diners, we would hold hands.

"Rosalie?" It's Emmett's voice at Edward's door—asking for me. I leap off of the bed, shove the notebook under Edward's pillow, and run to the door.

"Yes?" I answer tentatively, hand on the doorknob.

"Rosalie, stop messing up Edward's stuff," he yells through the door.

Why does everyone always assume I do that?

I throw open the door. "I am _not_."

"Babe, why are you in here?" Emmett is giving me that "you are such a handful" look, which he must realize will never dissuade me from my premeditated actions, because I love being a handful.

"I am doing him a _favor_," I reply, dragging my foot back and forth across the floor. "You _know_ the kind of music he listens to. I'm just doing a mild reorganization."

Emmett chuckles. That smile. It's more or less everything—there's no decoding those dimples, when I amuse him, it's all over his face. "If you bury his stuff in the backyard, he'll just dig it up," he says, and I take such offense to this. I would never be dumb enough to bury Edward's bad music in the _yard_.

I raise my hands in the air. "Do you see dirt underneath these fingernails? I'm clean as a whistle, baby."

"Okay, Rose," Emmett says, sweeping me into his arms, lifting me off the ground. I adore this, this gravity-defying nose-bumping we do every so often, the lead-up to the laughing, the nuzzling, the kissing. It's like being in the best nineties romantic comedy ever, and the credits never roll.

However, when the credits rolled on one of my many favorites—Alicia Silverstone, and plaid, and a Jane Austen backbone, and how could you ever deny the perfection of _Clueless_—I nudged Jasper in the ribs and said, "Right, but seriously, does that ever happen?" Jasper snorted. "He's her _brother_." And I punched him in the arm. "Not technically! But I'm serious. You're supposed to get backhanded in the face with love and then it's supposed to be like gooey happy snuggling for the rest of your life. Problems solved. But that doesn't really happen." Jasper turned to me, confused. "Doesn't it?"

My feet have found the ground again. "Mm, why are you putting me down?"

"Midnight football with Jas—I have to go kick his ass," he grins.

"So fun times with violence. Awesome."

He kisses my cheek. These are the gestures my mind saves, the ones I hold up to lyrics to say _I have had this too_. "I'll be back in an hour, tops."

He will be back in three hours. Super strength meets trained Confederate soldier will never take less than sixty minutes. I muster a passive aggressive "fine."

"I'm not kidding, babe. Do not rearrange his stuff."

"Not an issue," I say, following him through the threshold, shutting Edward's door behind me. It's all his.

xxx

I return home to find my Coldplay CDs in the trashcan, and I almost laugh at which promises Rosalie does keep. I fish _A Rush Of Blood to the Head _out of the bin, dust the pencil shavings off of the cover, and inspect the liner notes—_shocked_ that Rosalie hasn't either taken a red pen to them and mercilessly satirized the lyrics or simply blotted them all out. I think she may be developing restraint. Turning to face the shelf that houses my music collection, I find that—dear God—she's un-alphabetized everything.

_Christ_.

I turn off the lights, strip off my shirt, and climb into bed. It's a ritual more than anything else. I'm obviously not tired (though there is a certain internal pressure building up inside my skull), but I imagine that with enough concentration—something like meditation—I can stop thinking, stop hearing others' thoughts and forming my own, and feel some sort of genuine peace.

However, there's a certain jabbing in my skull. I reach behind my head, fingers exploring in the dark the space underneath my pillow before grasping the smooth edge of one of our notebooks. It's 1993. The first page, in the bottom right hand corner in Rose's faint script, reads: "Happy sixtieth, bastard." She is constantly in the margins of my verbalized and non-verbalized thoughts; my notes on _Pablo Honey_ are everywhere interrupted by " 'your skin makes me cry' is a new low, Edward," and occasionally those urgent insistences of hers—_So Tonight That I Might See is us forever, write that down_, _don't forget it. _Foolish nights spent staring at the ceiling together to a soundtrack of Mazzy Star.

I close my eyes and I am there. Rosalie whispering, " 'I want to hold the hand inside you,'" and I am already leaning into her, she is already pressing against my chest, as if asking me to make room for her. Skipping over verses to get to what I need to say, me replying: " 'I think it's strange you never knew,'" knowing that I have let my heart collapse for decades to create a space for her. She's…

Here.

She notices me blinking at her and looks mildly put out. "Why aren't you meditating?"

"_Because you're on top of me._"

She smiles, not making the slightest effort to move. "Yeah, but what does that say about your concentration?"

"Rose…" In so many ways, she utterly exhausts me, and her presence here does nothing to ease the panging concern in the back of my mind—how often I think about her, about us, how often I dissect our interactions, worries that I am inherently unsatisfiable, the _falling _missing from our love, and how often we lie in bed analyzing this tangle of limbs we've become. This is not the kind of love in love songs.

She rolls her eyes. "I'm just here because—"

"Why? Because you want to add Interpol to _This Is The New Year_?"

"Like I would come into your bedroom to playlist 2001…" she quips, and then, startled: "What did I say about reading my mind?"

"What did I say about staying out of my room?"

"Well, when I'm in your room, you normally don't say anything."

My body moves as if I am disconnected from it. I reach up towards her, take her face in my hands, and we are suspended like this for what feels like hours.

Finally: "We agreed," she whispers into my mouth.

"I know."

It's this torturous hesitation—we gave up on our retreat and advance battle strategies several wars ago, and now we stand on opposite sides of a wide-open field, daring each other to fire the first shot.

I can't stop myself from peering into her head for stolen hints (forward march, about face, at ease?), and _this_ is why I stopped listening to Rosalie's thoughts. It was not that she asked me to, begged me to, it was not that rooftop conversation two years ago, it was this reliable effect, the sheer force of her mind erasing all the thoughts from mine. There is only one word running through her head right now, the same syllable over and over and over and over, pulsing through her brain and suddenly my skull: now. _Now, now, now, now_.

Now we collide, my hands to her shoulders, her lips to my skin, legs tangled in legs, and it's been so long.

xxx

It's been so long that I cannot feel anything but rapture at lying next to her, despite the impressive succession of swears in her head, her mental repetition of "I should not be here" and "you must stop doing this to him." It's only after the pleasure leaves my body and she walks from the room and diner lights fill up my mind's horizon that her _now_ drains from my consciousness and I realize:

I have to move my bed up to the attic.

xxx

Diner Lights

"Obstacle 1," Interpol, _Turn on the Bright Lights_

"Jigsaw Falling Into Place," Radiohead, _In Rainbows_

"In My Place," Coldplay, _A Rush of Blood to the Head_

"Fade Into You," Mazzy Star, _So Tonight That I Might See_

"Why I'm Lonely," Harvey Danger, _King James Version_

xxx

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**A/N:** Oh, you have no idea the mood I had to get into to write this chapter. Review and get me out of it?


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